Working Drafts

Luminal

Beatie Wolfe x Brian Eno

beatiewolfe.com ›

New to me, out since June 2025. It’s the third piece in a tidy little trilogy. Liminal, Lateral, Luminal. The covers are each gorgeous in that mind-short-circuit way. I stayed with it and found that the music has been this great low-level, stabilizing hum on my morning walks recently.

This also reminded me that Eno, along with Peter Chilvers, was involved in making one of my favorite iOS apps, Bloom. Back in the very early days of the App Store, this app was a mainstay on my iPhone home screen.

I also recently rewatched the Brian Eno scored documentary, "For All Mankind", a few months ago. Chills.

Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks

Brian Eno, Roger Eno, and Daniel Lanois

Listen on Apple Music ›

Working Drafts*. A blog. Or whatever we call these things now that “blog” feels so old fashioned.

Sharing things in public has never come naturally to me. Outside of the design work I have done for other people, I am not especially present online. But a corner of the internet I actually own, my domain, my files, my words, feels a little magical. No platforms. No algorithms. In 2025 this format feels both incredibly archaic and, for someone who grew up on the early web, weirdly correct.

Wax Era is the home for my design work first, so there is really no pressure for this blog to become anything huge. Let it be loose. Let it become whatever it becomes. That seems like the only sane way to start.

I decided to set a few guardrails, mostly to keep myself from drifting into places I do not want to go:

• No thought leadership. No guru posture. Nothing that smells like a TED Talk or LinkedIn evangelizing.
• No forced cheer about how I am crushing it.
• No SEO tricks, no cross posting, no algorithmic manipulation.
• And no confessional oversharing. I want to be human and present without sliding into melodrama.

What I do want is a home for the things I am drawn to. You can see the rough set of topics in the sidebar, which will give you a sense of what is coming. There will be design talk. There will be some sports, mostly from the angle of uniforms and visual identity. There will be posts about computers and software. I read a lot and also am interested in the design of book covers, so that will show up here as well. In short, there are many interests I hope to carry through to this space.

So this is the starting point for the experiment. I will end this first post with a quote from one of my favorite novelists, Douglas Coupland, from his book Life After God. I am sure he will come up again here before long.

“I have always tried to speak with a voice that has no regional character—a voice from nowhere. This is because I have never really felt like I was “from” anywhere; home to me, as I have said, is a shared electronic dream of cartoon memories, half-hour sitcoms and national tragedies. I have always prided myself on my lack of accent—my lack of any discernible regional flavor. I used to think mine was a Pacific Northwest accent, from where I grew up, but then I realized my accent was simply the accent of nowhere—the accent of a person who has no fixed home in their mind.”

Life After God

Douglas Coupland

Goodreads ›

Bartlett Giamatti, in his book Take Time for Paradise: Americans and Their Games, wrote…

“Baseball breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”

Giamatti, the former commissioner of baseball (and someone whose baseball card I once owned), is also the late father of actor Paul Giamatti, who starred in one of my all-time favorite movies, Sideways.